kindle-cover-skill

Claude skill that generates full-wrap paperback cover PDFs for Amazon KDP.

Takes a front cover image and produces a print-ready PDF with front, spine, and back cover — correctly sized for KDP upload.

Part of the KDP Publishing Toolkit — use with kindle-book-skill to go from manuscript to published book entirely inside Claude.

What it does

• Calculates spine width from page count and paper type
• Places your front cover image with configurable fit (cover/contain)
• Generates back cover with headline, bullet points, tagline
• Applies KDP-compliant bleed (0.125") and safe zones (0.375")
• Outputs a single PDF ready for KDP Paperback upload
• No barcode — Amazon places its own at print time

Install

claude install nikmcfly/kindle-cover-skill

Quick start

Just tell Claude:

Make a paperback cover for my book. Front image is cover.jpg,
title "Digital Dolls, Real Dollars" by Nik McFly, 333 pages.
Back cover should say it's a 333-page playbook with 28 chapters.

Or invoke directly:

python3 scripts/generate_cover.py \
  --front-image cover.jpg \
  --title "My Book Title" \
  --author "Author Name" \
  --pages 333 \
  --output fullwrap_cover.pdf \
  --back-headline "The book they don't want you to read" \
  --back-bullets "200+ pages of real tactics" "Step-by-step guides" "Case studies" \
  --back-tagline "Based on documented results, not theory."

Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
--front-image	Yes	—	Front cover image (JPG/PNG)
--title	Yes	—	Book title (appears on spine)
--author	Yes	—	Author name (appears on spine)
--pages	Yes	—	Page count (determines spine width)
--output	Yes	—	Output PDF path
--trim	No	6x9	Trim size: 5x8, 5.5x8.5, 6x9, 8.5x11
--paper	No	white	Paper type: white or cream
--front-fit	No	cover	cover (crop to fill) or contain (fit inside)
--front-padding	No	0	Inches of padding around front image
--back-headline	No	—	Main headline text (use \n for line breaks)
--back-subtitle	No	—	Subtitle below headline
--back-bullets	No	—	Bullet point items
--back-cta	No	—	Bold call-to-action line
--back-tagline	No	—	Italic closing line
--accent-color	No	#e040a0	Color for accent line and bullets
--bg-color	No	#0a0a0a	Back cover background
--spine-bg	No	#111111	Spine background

Example output

Full wrap: back cover + spine + front cover in one PDF

KDP specs

Spec	Value
Bleed	0.125" all sides
Safe zone	0.375" from trim (text only)
Spine	Auto-calculated per page count
White paper	0.002252" per page
Cream paper	0.0025" per page

Workflow with kindle-book-skill

These two skills cover the complete KDP publishing pipeline:

                    ┌─────────────────────┐
   manuscript.md ──▶│  kindle-book-skill  │──▶ book.epub (Kindle eBook)
                    │                     │──▶ book.pdf  (print interior)
                    └─────────────────────┘
                              │
                         page count
                              │
                              ▼
                    ┌─────────────────────┐
    cover.jpg ────▶│ kindle-cover-skill  │──▶ fullwrap.pdf (KDP cover)
                    └─────────────────────┘

1. Use kindle-book-skill to convert your markdown manuscript into EPUB + print PDF
2. Note the page count from the PDF output
3. Use kindle-cover-skill to generate the full-wrap cover with that page count
4. Upload all three files to KDP

Dependencies

pip install reportlab Pillow

License

MIT

Author

Nik McFly